Saturday, April 13, 2019
¿Names?
Names are tremendously important in Toni Morrison’s “the beloved”. You can glean a lot of information about a character based on their name. For example “Denver” has a full backstory associated with her name, that we slowly learn. And also Paul D says a lot just by his name. There are several Paul’s and it shows just how little they think of them based on the fact they names them all the same.
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2 comments:
I talked about this in my blog post reply to Lainey’s. I agree that names are extremely important. I suggest you go read Lainey’s too. She goes into pretty good detail about Sethe. The several Paul’s that are mentioned are named that but aren’t all called that. They are probably called different nick names or their different last/middle names. Maybe later in the book we can get more insight about this discussion.
I agree that names definitely play a role in Beloved. In fact, Beloved’s name shows a good bit about her character. Her name clearly invoked an image of love which tells us a lot about her character. Beloved indicates that she is in need of some sort of love because she is obsessed with Sethe. She shows that she wants Sethe to love her so badly that she wants to get rid of Paul D. She clearly hates him because he takes all of Sethe attention that could be given to her. Meanwhile, we have Denver who clearly loves Beloved but Beloved doesn’t seemingly really care for Denver as much. Denver, because has been lonely her entire life, wishes to have a companion, and she tries finding that in Beloved but fails. The fact tha Denver tries to continually give Beloved attention but Beloved does not return Denver’s feelings is ironic because of Beloved’s name.
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